The proliferation of cloud based services and platforms continues to increase. Specifically, cloud-based content management services and platforms have impacted the way personal and corporate electronically stored information objects (e.g., files, images, videos, etc.) are stored, and has also impacted the way such personal and corporate content is shared and managed. One benefit of using such cloud-based platforms is the ability to securely share large volumes of content among trusted collaborators on a variety of user devices such as mobile phones, tablets, laptop computers, desktop computers, and/or other devices. For example, a large enterprise with thousands of users (e.g., employees) and many terabytes of content might use a cloud-based content storage platform to efficiently and securely facilitate content access to various individual users and/or collaborative groups of users. In such cases, a user can access a large volume of objects stored in the cloud-based platform from a user device that might store merely a small portion of that volume locally. Such access can enable multiple users (e.g., collaborators) to manage certain shared objects for various collaborative purposes (e.g., co-development, audience presentation, etc.). Specifically, users can manage (e.g., create, view, edit, execute, etc.) the shared objects using various applications operating on a user device. For example, multiple users might collaborate on the development of a certain design document (e.g., design101.pdf) using a respective instance of an application (e.g., Adobe Acrobat) operating on a respective user device. In some cases, such collaborative documents and/or other objects stored in the cloud-based content storage platform can be large.
Unfortunately, legacy techniques for presenting a local device representation of a shared content object stored on a cloud-based storage system can be limited at least as pertaining to latencies associated with presenting the shared content object locally to the user. More specifically, certain legacy approaches might process a request to open a certain file stored on a cloud-based storage system on a local user device by downloading the full file to local device memory before presenting it to the user for interaction (e.g., viewing, editing, etc.). In such cases, the delay experienced by the user before having access to the requested file can be significant. Such delays can be increased when network download speeds are degraded due to certain network conditions. Further, even in cases when the user might desire to access merely a small portion of the requested file, the full file will nonetheless be downloaded to the local memory, wasting costly network bandwidth and wastefully consuming local storage space. Moreover, for large files, consumption of local device storage space can degrade the performance of the local device and/or, in some cases, can raise an error when opening the requested file. Some legacy approaches might facilitate partial downloading of objects having a certain known structure. For example, a video file composed using a standard format (e.g., MPEG-4, AVI, etc.) can be partially downloaded for interaction (e.g., viewing) using various information (e.g., metadata, playlist file, etc.) and/or protocols (e.g., built in to the viewing application) specific to the format. As another example, certain legacy approaches enable the viewing of file previews (e.g., photo thumbnails, index thumbnails, etc.) for a given application and/or file type (e.g., photos, PDF files, etc.). The foregoing legacy approaches, however, are limited at least in that partial downloading techniques rely on knowledge of the file layout and/or on preconditions that might not always be present during the downloading processes, particularly across the many various object types that might comprise the shared content of a cloud-based storage system.
What is needed is a technique or techniques to improve over legacy and/or over other considered approaches. Some of the approaches described in this background section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.